Charlotte Goes Live

I wish I could help with that tax stuff - I'm self employed after all - but I know UK law but nothing else. It's pretty straight forward here and I fill in my own tax returns and prepare my wifes books - hers are much more complicated - for our accountants.
I've been thinking recently that I would like to earn some money from art but with all the printing process' involved I felt kinda overwhelmed with all the choices. However, yesterday I did see that Etsy have lots of artists who sell their work as digital downloads - literally as jpegs pngs etc - and their customers then print them out themselves.
I believe Etsy is free until you sell something though in the uk you do need a PayPal account.
The other avenue I've been looking at is something called Displate. If you spend any time on FB I'm sure you've seen their ads that pop up with monotonous regularity. This is a site that you upload artwork to, they print and ship it to customers and obviously take a commission. I have no idea how popular it is with art buyers - I'm always a little concerned about anything that appears so regularly on FaceBook - but the images I can see look a lot more like the kind of thing we produce on this site.
As a word of warning though I have no idea how safe (copyright wise) Displate is. There is an option to report copyright infringes but I cant imagine how you would even know if some one is stealing your work.
Anyway, good luck with it all Charlotte, keep us informed and I'll let you know if I have any success figuring out how to set up a decent Etsy shop.

Charlotte wrote:

...lots of sellers and not very many buyers...

I think that's the big issue right there!

Never heard of Displate (not being a facebooker) but I think a lot of online moneymaking sites only work well when you have fans or followers. Over on Patreon, sakimichan can easily cash in with all those fans coughing up 50-60 thousand dollars a month but if you don't have that kind of fanbase I imagine it can be a pretty desolate place.
It'd be great if it was just about doing the paintings but it also requires marketing and promotion and ...erm... stuff. And I know as much about that as I do about tax.

Hey Charlotte, I have an art friend who has started selling her work on Society6. She's been really happy with it and I believe has even made the move to go full time. I'm not sure about the ins and outs of it, but she's just been doing little graphic doodles, she even just calls them 'doodles' because they kinda just look like the stuff you doodle on notebook margins. May be worth looking into when you're ready. I think people are more likely to buy art stuff when it's printed on useful things they can use everyday. Like a throw pillow, a bag/purse, t-shirt, leggings, that sort of thing. She also just does some plain prints too, but limited runs.

Anyways, I'm sorry you're going through a tough time by the sounds of it. The battles within ourselves are never easy and you never really do 'cure' it. You just get better at coping, hopefully. Do you take walks? My mom battles with anxiety and depression, but she got into walking (she hates the gym, running is too hard on her) and at first she did it just to help be in better shape, but she found making it a consistent thing she did at the same time every day really helped her mental stuff too. She found it much easier to actually practice her 'coping' stuff when she had had a walk for the day (And we're talking like a mile here, nothing wild and crazy). Just a thought unless I'm way off base about something (which happens a lot and I will not be bothered by you saying so!). I know what seems like a helpful thing in one case doesn't always apply to another. You just seemed pretty yuck about a gym option.